Inclusion is a right – How Cisco is supporting careers with digital

More than ever, with the help of digital, we have been able to address many challenging situations. At Cisco Customer Experience in EMEAR, our obsession with digital goes beyond bringing innovation and excellence to the customer experience. It brings inclusion to the human experience!

Since January, my team of Digital geniuses embraced giving back through a virtual mentorship program in partnership with SOS Children’s Villages in Morocco. This program aims to bring technology literacy and essential workplace skills to Moroccan youth to help them land a dream job.

When helping others is the way to help ourselves

Through family foster programs, insertion of children and youngsters in public schools, and providing girls apartments in urban areas, SOS Children’s Villages in Morocco has been working to enable access to education and training facilities for decades.

Director of SOS Children´s Villages in Morocco, Beatrice Beloubad, has been devoted to the Association for the last 26 years. “I was supposed to retire this year, but I requested to stay for 2 more. I feel very passionate about the projects and driven to provide inclusive opportunities in Morocco, my adoptive country.”

Beatrice moved to Morocco after graduating, and always felt a deep connection with the SOS Children’s Villages concept: protect children and provide them an inclusive environment to bond emotionally and flourish, despite traumatic experiences.

“My mother was Italian and moved to France to escape the war. She struggled a lot to fit in, besides learning the language and even changing her name. As a young girl, it was hard to witness such discrimination. I believe my motivation to help people comes from knowing how hurtful and damaging it is to feel excluded.”

Enabling inclusion, autonomy and economic independence with digital

Moroccan society still faces inclusion and gender disparities regarding access to education. 20% of girls will never go to school due to lack of birth registration, early weddings, and illiteracy predominantly in rural areas [1]. Like everywhere in the world, COVID-19 brought a lot of additional challenges. Many youngsters lost their jobs and were forced to return to their villages to survive.

To face this situation, the teams of SOS Children’s Villages in Morocco and the Cisco CX Digital Mentorship program came together to drive true impact. The program includes virtual sessions that cover best practices on how to build an engaging CV, nail a job interview, communicate effectively, and use Social Media for job hunting. In addition, Cisco Networking Academy provides IT and cybersecurity sessions with proper certification to be used for future jobs.

Volunteers from the Digital Experience team impacting the world from home

Since the program started, the SOS Morocco team reported a significant impact on the teenagers: “The content is totally new to them, they feel impacted at an individual level, and this is what is so unique, powerful about the Digital Mentorship program with Cisco”, says Beatrice Beloubad, director of SOS Children’s Villages Morocco.

“Working with Cisco has been such a rewarding experience. Our efforts can only be amplified if we partner with companies who are willing to invest time and resources to bring innovation and future opportunities to our children and youth. Cisco is fueling our motivation and resilience to carry on with our mission for a more inclusive world”, she added.

I can’t help but feel humble with such great impact we´ve been creating. Connecting Moroccan youth with valuable and timely information that will change their lives forever just made me realize the great power we hold in our hands to connect the unconnected.

Inclusion is a right, an everyday commitment. At Cisco, we are not just dreamers, we do not just build bridges, we cement unity in diversity. And this is just the beginning.

Together we can do so much more! Help us by donating to our Campaign on BrightFunds:

Cisco Digital Lifecycle Journeys Care4All – SOS Villages d’Enfants Maroc Fund

Beatrice Beloubad, Director of SOS Children´s Villages in Morocco

[1] * figures from the report “Discriminations intersectionnelles des femmes’ au Maroc” from the National Observatory for Human Development, 2020